Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues - 2014 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Will Ferrell, Steve Carell
Director:  Adam McKay

Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is the It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World for our generation - get a bunch of the era's funniest people together in a movie that is supposed to be 'funny' but is not.  The film's humor lies mostly in recognition - 'I recognize that cameo!' 'I recognize that joke - it's from the previous movie!'  I guess I shouldn't've expected different.  The film also decides that Steve Carell's character needed more lines and more time on screen.  It's not like this film lacks inventiveness - some of its new bits are inspired, absurd comedy.  It's just dragged down by all the other stuff.  The Ron Burgundy character's obliviousness barely survived one film, but here it reaches tedium.

Blue Ruin - 2013 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Macon Blair, Devin Ratray
Director:  Jeremy Saulnier

Note:  Minor Spoilers Ahead

Perhaps it's watching Indie Game that has me thinking this way, but Blue Ruin is a film with clear video game logic.  Our main character doesn't seem to be making choices - he appears to be programmed.  His world has a few stark options, but he is not given free motion.  He picks up and discards certain objects.  Critical information is given to him by other people which assists him on his quest.  It's not hard to imagine Blue Ruin: The Video Game and it could be rather interesting.  It's a good movie, but it's limited by the fact that everything that drives the action happened off-screen to characters we never meet.  I suppose that's suggestive of something about the way that life works, but how life works doesn't always make for great movies.

Drinking Buddies - 2013 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Olivia Wilde, Jake Johnson
Director:  Joe Swanberg

I've not seen a Joe Swanberg film before - I do know they have a reputation for being improvisational and talky and mumblecore-y and whatever words you want to throw on it.  The film definitely meanders, but sometimes a film needs to meander in order to hit the notes it's going for.  Relationships - romantic or otherwise - are generally unspoken agreements, and this film explores what happens when people try to say as little about those relationships as possible.  I suspect the main criticism of this film is that none of the characters are likable, but I also think that for the film to exist in the space that it does, they can't be likable.

Indie Game - 2012 - No Rating

Subject:  Video game designers who make 'auteur' games outside of the confining system of corporate video games.
Director:  Lisanne Pajot, James Swirsky

I don't really play video games made after 1998.  It's not a 'holier-than-thou' stance on gaming, I just lost interest in the medium and when it came time for me to possibly return to gaming, I found the idea boring.  Indie Game makes me think there are people out there who still have the idea I do about games, they just happen to love them and program them.  We've seen plenty of films about people who make art for a living - video games are an even trickier business, I think, because they have to be programmed properly (i.e. without bugs) and they have to be 'fun'.  How can someone tell after spending years on a project if it's still fun anymore?  What do we ultimately want out of a game as a consumer?   I didn't expect a documentary on video game designers to remind me of Andrei Rublev, but here we are.

Stardust Memories - 1980 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Woody Allen, Charlotte Rampling
Director:  Woody Allen

Stardust Memories is the kind of film that picks you up and shakes you by the lapels (and assumes you are wearing lapels).  It's Woody Allen screaming 'Can't you see?!  Don't you get it?'  And yes - this film principally exists as an apologia for his turn away from outright farce into more dramatic territory.  It's hard not to read authorial intent into this film, but it also seems to think that Allen's turn into dramatic territory is also funny, just on a cosmic level rather than a Three Stooges level.  His apartment having a blown up picture of the famous picture of a man being shot in Vietnam is just as funny to me as having a famous Marx Brothers scene.  Stardust Memories also pounds us over the head with its examination of fame's downside - indeed, we see it conferring almost no advantages on Allen's character, as even his chaffeured Rolls Royce becomes a burden. This would make a solid double feature piece with The King of Comedy, but then again, just about anything would.

Interstellar - 2014 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Matthew Mcconaughey, Anne Hathaway
Director:  Christopher Nolan

Note:  Vague spoilers ahead

Oh, Christopher Nolan, you rascal, you.  You get me to see your movies because they are really cool - and Interstellar is indeed cool.  It's one of the most visually captivating films I've ever seen.  The characterization isn't bad or lazy.  The world is as developed as a Christopher Nolan world is ever going to get - and indeed, while this world does not feel lived in, who needs a film world to feel lived in?  Kubrick's films don't feel lived in either.  Furthermore, the film is ambitious as all get out.  So why do I think this movie is not a success?  The same reason why I don't think any other Christopher Nolan films are great - the plot.  The characters don't feel like they are real people - they feel like they are slaves to a plot that requires them to do these things.  And indeed, this is true intra-film here.  It's hard to feel like you've seen something compelling when the movie itself tells you that its characters are slaves.  So while I think this is a good movie and that people will probably enjoy it, it's the last Christopher Nolan film I will see unless I get word that this movie does not fall prey to Nolanism.

The Sacrifice - 1986 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Erland Josephson, Susan Fleetwood
Director:  Andrei Tarkovsky

Note:  Vague spoilers ahead

It's been quite some time since I watched a Tarkovsky film, and indeed there are not many left for me to see for the first time.  The thing I forgot about Tarkovsky is that one has to be prepared to be clueless for part of the film, and indeed I was both confused and bored for the middle third of the film.  What follows is one of the most captivating and audacious endings to a film I've seen in quite some time.  You get your usual Tarkovsky features here - philosophical conversations, lots of mirrors, lots of shots of flowing water - and like many a Tarkovsky it will probably make less sense as the film ends, but oh how I'd like to be in some 1980s coffee shop discussing what this film means after having seen it in a theater.  I really should rate this one twice - 2½ stars for the first 2 hours, and then a big 5 stars for the finish.

Destiny Turns On The Radio - 1995 - 2 Stars

Actors:  Dylan McDermott, Nancy Travis
Director:  Jack Baran

I normally don't review movies I watch for goofs.  I wouldn't know about this movie if I hadn't heard David Cross tell a story onstage about working with Jim Belushi.  That anecdote wasn't very interesting, but when I found out that Destiny is the last name of a character called Johnny Destiny and that he is played by Quentin Tarantino this moved into must-see territory - how could this movie be anything but a disaster?

It turns out that this movie is actually not terrible.  It's certainly not good - it's like a bad version of Wild At Heart, with McDermott doing an ill-concealed impression of Nicolas Cage.  So it's easy to see why this movie is totally forgotten - it's a mash-up of better movies and its craziness isn't totally batshit.  If you like to see a naked and electrified Quentin Tarantino emerging from a hotel pool, this movie is for you.

The Unknown Known - 2014 - 3½ Stars

Subject:  Donald Rumsfeld and his career at the highest echelons of decision-making
Director:  Errol Morris

I'd watch anything Errol Morris does, so I'm not really a good person to review his films.  Some might find his visual style distracting, and while it wasn't particularly inspired this time around, it's still far superior to the talking head style that dominates most factual-type documentaries.  There can be unnecessary visual irony in Morris films, but here, the ironies are almost all audio-based.  And there's some doozies.

Note:  Some Spoilers Ahead

Morris is unkind to Rumsfeld - I wish that he had let Rumsfeld hang himself more.  We don't get a real good account of Rumsfeld's early career - how did he rise to power?  Morris's film seems to imply it's by Machiavellian means.  We don't get much of a look at what he was doing between stints in the White Houses, and we don't get a clear explanation of why George H.W. Bush hated him.  The strong implication from the film is that Rumsfeld is somewhat of a stooge - he's the kind of person who runs to the dictionary when he's asked what something means.  He holds press conferences on a war where he appears absolutely delighted to be the center of attention.  He's vainglorious and condescending.  He seems to offer no answers to questions he's not interested in answering - not even half answers.  Indeed, the final question of the film is a brutal gut punch, because I think I believe Rumsfeld when he says he has no idea why he agreed to do this film.  He must've seen Morris's A Fog Of War, which at least to me portrayed Robert McNamara as a guy who had the wrong idea about stuff but a man who could explain himself.  Rumsfeld's lies are barely concealed, and indeed, he seems like a walking affirmation of the Peter Principle.  Shame for the nation, then.

Spartan - 2004 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Val Kilmer, Derek Luke
Director:  David Mamet

I think Spartan is probably a failure.  It's about 45 minutes of dynamite Hitchcockian thriller.  Then it's about an hour of plot threads coming together in a way that reveals the weakness of the plot.  Hitchcock films are almost universally ridiculous, plot-wise - the way they work is by letting the viewer know as much as the protagonist.  Mamet violates this rule about halfway through the movie and it leaves us wondering when the protagonist will realize his error - and we know that he must, otherwise there's no movie - and what's left is us knowing both more and less than the protagonist.  Either way it's got some fun Mamet-y dialogue - not enough to save the film.  I give it 3 stars on the basis of the beginning alone, really.  When you shoot for a modern Manchurian Candidate, sometimes you end up with this.

Boyhood - 2014 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Ellar Coltrane, Ethan Hawke
Director:  Richard Linklater

Boyhood is a splendid film - it's hard not to give it points for the difficulty of its construction.  Requiring over a decade to tell its story in stages, it very easily could've turned out to be an unsalvagable, self-indulgent mess.  Instead, it grabs at all sorts of slices of one's childhood - it makes one's heart ache to remember being that young.  Regardless, the film doesn't just seize at your memories in an attempt to bring them to your brain and make you feel stuff - it succeeds in being emotionally captivating in its own right.

Chuck Klosterman said that cinema verite is his least favorite style because any attempt to make the film look 'real' only highlights its artificiality.  While Boyhood is not shot cinema verite, the film is attempting a kind of realism that can sound and look awfully tin-eared during its few missteps.

American Hustle - 2013 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Christian Bale, Amy Adams
Director:  David O. Russell

American Hustle gets a lot right - it's got fun performances from a long list of solid actors.  It's a period piece so we get to enjoy the 1970s.  It's got some tense scenes.  In all though, it's a film about con men, and one of the problems I have with some con men films is that I can't care about the protagonist's happiness.  He's a chronic liar driven to do so by whatever drives him.  I suppose the title 'American' in this film is supposed to indicate that the characters are microcosmic of America, but I'm not buying it.  Fun film but I'd be surprised if I remembered much about it three months from now.

The World's End - 2013 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Simon Pegg, Nick Frost
Director:  Edgar Wright

The World's End is the conclusion to a trilogy of sorts, and so there is quite a lot of meta stuff about rehashing the past and repeating what you've already done, trying to make it better.  The best part about said meta stuff is that it functions perfectly well narratively in the film.  Furthermore, it is refreshing to see a comedy that is not just 10 scenes of improv dashed together - this is a legitimate film, with Edgar Wright providing outstanding direction.  Even though things flag near the end, it's still an achievement.

Before Midnight - 2013 - 5 Stars

Actors:  Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Director:  Richard Linklater

Does the Before trilogy work as films?  I guess that's my only real issue with the series - could there be another form in which to present these ideas?  I don't think so.  While these films frequently feature long takes and long conversations, there's still little interspersed moments of humanity that the artificiality of a play couldn't capture.  As a work on the page, the temptation would be to give us readers the thoughts of the characters as they're saying this stuff, making it seem formal and staid.  No, this series works not only because of the writing, but because of the superb acting - it's so good because it so rarely seems like acting.  And even with all the speaking being done, there are still things left unspoken.  Regardless, even though it does not take advantage of everything film has to offer, it's a magnificent work of art.

The Wolf Of Wall Street - 2013 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill
Director:  Martin Scorsese

'Memoir films' are a genre that Martin Scorsese has tackled before, most notably in Goodfellas, the film to which The Wolf Of Wall Street is endlessly compared.  Both films feature protagonist con men telling their life story (which story is purportedly true), but considering they are con men, it's very easy to believe that there are many fictions intervowen into this narrative.  When a self-promoter tells any story, it's with the aim of promoting himself - this is his life story, so imagine how much self-promotion there is in here!  The film plays around with this idea of the narrator's memory versus actual events a few times.

The Wolf Of Wall Street manages to fully examine what happens when you view everything around you as vehicles to satisfy your desires.  I'm not sure where the ninnies got the idea that this film glorifies wealth and drug use.

Deceptive Practice: The Mysteries And Mentors Of Ricky Jay - 2012 - 3 Stars

Subject:  Sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay and his development as an artist
Director:  Molly Bernstein

I hate the term 'magic' - indeed, this documentary prefers the term sleight-of-hand - but Ricky Jay is a magician.  The thing about magic, memorably spoofed on Arrested Development, is that 'effects' (as they're called here) are secrets.  They're all the magician has - once he's told you the trick, it's useless.  So naturally this is a documentary about the fact that Ricky Jay has been told many secrets by many different prestidigitators, but none of those secrets are shared here.  It appears therefore that the defining characteristic of these people is delight in knowing things that others don't know, and it takes years of getting to know these people and earning their respect before they'll share anything with you.  That's a bit of a thin premise to hang a documentary on, and without archival film of Ricky Jay's act, there wouldn't be much to this at all.  But there's archival film of Ricky Jay's act.

Kontroll - 2005 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Sandor Csanyi, Zoltan Musci
Director:  Nimrod Antal

One can go through an easy list of Kontroll's influences - it's the director's first movie and it feels like it.  'I've always wanted to do this - let's do it!' seems like the attitude on some of the odd digressions the movie takes.  What's strange about this film is that even though it has a shambling quality to it - it doesn't really seem to conform to 3-act conventions - the characters are almost all stock Hollywood action-comedy film characters.  Nor does the plot quite move in the way that some action films do, where the entire film gobbles itself up, leaving no space for the viewer to imagine anything about its characters.

The movie begins with a warning from a Hungarian functionary who evidently approved the shooting locations - he claims that the characters depicted don't represent real people. This is a good reminder of how ballsy it has to be to be a filmmaker in a country like Hungary.

Smashed - 2012 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Aaron Paul
Director:  James Ponsoldt

One of the temptations of film is to jump through time.  We might be shown a relationship, then later on in the film, we might see its beginning.  It's tempting because stories are fun and it's a little thrill for the audience to see what the characters don't know, that this is going somewhere they can't imagine.  But life is always going somewhere people can't imagine.  One of the strengths of Smashed is that it lets us imagine what happened off-screen, because a lot of what goes on happens off-screen.

There's a few stock 'movie' things in here - conflicts resolve in ways that are telegraphed ahead of time.  And the film is so small-scale that sometimes it doesn't feel lived in - there's so few actors used that it feels like we're not getting the full picture of who these people are.  Still, it has strong performances and solid writing, and certainly does not outstay its welcome.

Drug War - 2012 - 3½ Stars

Actors:  Honglei Sun, Louis Koo
Director:  Johnnie To

Drug War almost seems propagandistic in its opening moments, as hordes of police and surveillance converge on outmatched drug traffickers.  Considering the penalty for drug trafficking in China is death (and this is explicitly mentioned in the first ten minutes of the film), it seems like it might be a good idea to make a film where drug trafficking is shown as an impossible endeavor.  This tone shifts somewhere in the film, and that's what elevates this from a basic action/thriller type film into something quite a lot better.  It's still a genre film, but a high point of said genre.  I wish sometimes that American films could come unmoored in the way that this one does.

Ted - 2012 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Mark Wahlberg, Seth MacFarlane
Director:  Seth MacFarlane

I will defend seasons 1-3 of Family Guy to anyone willing to listen.  Indeed, even as the show was canceled, my friends and I watched pirated episodes on RealPlayer, and it was likely my generation that saved the show from the ashbin of TV history.  It's now one of the longest-running shows of all time, and I have absolutely no interest in watching another episode of it.  Still, the point is, I will defend the first 3 seasons as being quite funny, even as Family Guy's sense of humor failed to evolve over the years (and, indeed, regressed).

So what could I expect out of Seth MacFarlane's whacked-out, demented mind when freed of the shackles of television?  Well, I got pretty much what I expected - a few solid jokes, some racism and misogyny that should've likely ended up on the cutting room floor (somehow it's worse in live action), but overall a watchable film.  Of course the film is about a man-child who cannot grow up and has to be dragged into adulthood by a woman, but the real triumph of the film is making Mila Kunis's character not a shrew or a buzzkill.

Under The Skin - 2014 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Scarlett Johanssen, Jeremy McWilliams
Director:  Jonathan Glazer

Under The Skin is a zero-exposition movie.  Anything that happens in this film is left up to the viewer to figure out.  This often leads the viewer to question - 'What is happening here?  What is going on?'.  Left without much help from the film, the next question quickly becomes 'Why am I watching this?'  Well, Under The Skin does pay off to some degree, but it's the kind of film that's more fun to think about after seeing than actually watching.  There's one scene where I thought the film might move towards something amazing, but it just veers more into inscrutability.  No-exposition films are tricky - I don't think this one quite did it, though I could foresee a future where I like this film much more six months from now without having seen it.  It's certainly memorable even if the overall experience may not be.

Rush - 2013 - 3 Stars

Actors:  Chris Hemsworth, Daniel Bruhl
Director:  Ron Howard

Rush suffers from what I like to call the Oracle of Knowledge problem.  This is where a character in a film has an outrageously deep and nuanced view of a thing, but we the viewer have no real reason to believe him or her except for their force of character.  It's a small issue as the film goes on, but I've never been a fan of portrayals of genius that make it seem utterly effortless.  Genius may look effortless, but often is not.

I'm no fan of Ron Howard films - I feel like he turns good scripts into mediocre ones and mediocre scripts into bad ones - but here I think he fares quite well.  Of course we get a trademark Howard shot - that's a camera looking at a camera - and another plot point that hinges on The Importance Of Television (this subplot of Apollo 13 is its most regrettable).  Still, there's some interesting shots here that elevate the film beyond its script, and I'm not sure there's another Howard film I'd say that about.

4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days - 2007 - 4½ Stars

Actors:  Anamaria Marinca, Laura Vasiliu
Director:  Cristian Mungiu

Directors tend to like pomp.  How can I stage this scene - how can I make the right cuts to people's faces?  Cristian Mungiu understands that tension can often be built the opposite way.  Leave the camera in one spot and let the scene play out where it is.  The unbrokenness of the scene further emphasizes the reality.  There's a masterful example of this later in the film where the tension is not even happening on screen or just off it.

4 Months... effectively avoids exploitation (though coming awful close) while portraying a grim subject, without melodrama or High Tragedy.  Some directors would want half the lines in this film to be shouted.  Not so, here.